I think your opinion here is too paternalistic and fatalistic. People can and do adapt when the incentives become strong enough.
It's certainly possible, but it also helps to be young and healthy; not to have any particular life obligations; to be a bit alienated from your native environment in the first place; and to have a somewhat unrealistic view of your own capabilities :) It also helps if you're moving from lesser to greater opportunities. If you're moving from SF (for example) to somewhere much cheaper, you're likely also facing a narrowing of your available economic, academic and other options.
So although I share your views to a certain extent, I think you're also taking a rather rosy view of things. It is certainly possible to move and adapt, but there are significant costs involved and it's not equally easy to move in any direction.
Is the argument that SF's homeless have it too good, and if we made their condition worse (i.e., increased the "incentives"), that would solve the problem? Which incentives exactly do you have in mind? They are already subject to shockingly high levels of violence, which the police appear incapable of protecting them from. Do the levels of violence need to be even higher?
None of these things are true for low-income people today.
It also helps that they are willing to take almost any job and work their asses off. It will keep you from being homeless.
> It will keep you from being homeless.
It does help, but it will not always keep you from homelessness. There simply aren't enough jobs.
Seriously though, 'there aren't enough jobs' is just a weird thing to say. Aren't enough jobs for what? For everyone to not be homeless?
Let me paint you a picture. You are homeless. At night, when it rains, you get wet. After a day of panhandling, you have $30.
Do you:
1. Buy a meal (loaf of bread and coffee, $4) and save as much as possible for bus fare.
2. Buy a tent, so at least you can stay dry and avoid illness.
3. Buy 2 fifths of rotgut vodka and drink it on the sidewalk.
The problem has absolutely nothing to do with jobs. If you had 5 open jobs for every person in the country, the same people would still be homeless.
Yes, I am saying that the way that we treat people who have mental health issues discourages them even further.
> Aren't enough jobs for what?
I have friends from college who had to move back in with their parents because they literally could not find a job. They applied everywhere, even McDonalds. No work.
> If you had 5 open jobs for every person in the country, the same people would still be homeless.
No, they wouldn't. _Some_ people would be, there's always the travel punk kids. But even your hypothetical is giving me a decision between rational choices. You left off the 'the voices from your paranoid schizophrenia are so loud that all you can do is lie there in a ball' option.
I have another anecdote to counter your anecdote. I have a friend just arrived a couple of weeks ago. In the first week she was able to find two jobs. One in a hotel in the buffet area and another in a clothing factory.